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The tragic news on
September 13, 2008, that Peter Camejo had lost his battle with cancer is a blow to all those on the revolutionary left who
have been politically and personally influenced by him. As a tribute, Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal
republishes two of Peter's most influential and enduring lectures,
talks that continue to educate young revolutionary socialists to this
day.

Peter Camejo in 2005, photo by Charles Jenks.

Peter Camejo
was a longtime leader of the United States Socialist Workers Party. As
a leader of the Young Socialist Alliance, the youth group associated
with the SWP, Camejo was a prominent activist in the student movement
at the University of California in Berkeley and in the anti-Vietnam war
movement. He was the presidential candidate of the SWP in 1976. (Listen to Peter Camejo interviewed on the NBC's Tomorrow Showin 1976.) He parted company with the SWP in 1980 as its politics increasingly became more sectarian (Camejo's analysis of the US SWP's political evolution is available HERE.).

The following is the introduction to Why
Washington Hates Iran: A Political Memoir of the Revolution That Shook the
Middle East, a new Socialist Voice
pamphlet published by South Branch Publications. The entire pamphlet is
available for free download from http://readingfromtheleft.com/PDF/WhyWashingtonHatesIran.pdf.

The author, Barry Sheppard,
was a member of the US Socialist Workers Party for 28 years, and
a central leader of the party for most of that time. In 2005, Resistance
Books published the first volume of his political memoir, The Party: The Socialist Workers Party 1960-1988. The new pamphlet is a chapter from the second volume, now in
preparation.

Peter Camejo
was a longtime leader of the United States Socialist Workers Party. As
a leader of the Young Socialist Alliance, the youth group associated
with the SWP, Camejo was a prominent activist in the student movement
at the University of California in Berkeley and in the anti-Vietnam war
movement. He was the presidential candidate of the SWP in 1976.

Camejo
made a number of visits to Australia for the Democratic Socialist Party
and Resistance in the 1980s and 1990s, giving public lectures on US
politics and socialism.

“How
to Make a Revolution in the United States” is the abridged text of a
speech delivered by Peter Camejo at an educational conference of the
SWP and the YSA in New York on May 3, 1969. It is taken from the May
30, 1969 issue of The Militant.

“Liberalism,
Ultraleftism or Mass Action” is the abridged text of a talk given by
Camejo at a meeting in New York on June 14, 1970. It is taken from the
July 10, 1970 issue of The Militant.

Introduction

On
August 17, 1985 the National Committee of the Democratic Socialist
Perpective (then named the Socialist Workers Party) voted to end the
party’s affiliation to the Fourth International, the international
organisation founded in 1938 by the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky
and his supporters around the world.

This
decision, which was subsequently endorsed by the DSP’s 11th Congress,
held in Canberra in January 1986, was the result of a process of
rethinking within the DSP about many of the ideas it had shared in
common with other parties adhering to the Trotskyist movement.

By John PercyCaroline Lund, a lifelong fighter for socialism, workers’ rights and women’s liberation, and a contributing editor of Links, died at her home in Oakland, California, on October 14, aged 62. She will be sorely missed by her friends and comrades in the us and around the world who knew her, especially her lifelong partner and comrade Barry Sheppard.

Caroline was won to revolutionary socialist ideas in 1962 when she attended Carlton College, a small liberal arts college just south of Minneapolis. Caroline quickly became a leader of the swp’s youth organisation, the Young Socialist Alliance (YSA). In 1965 she moved to New York where she met and married Barry Sheppard, a key younger swp leader. From 1967, she was often on full time for the swp in a range of assignments—leading different campaigns, organising, international work and writing for the socialist press.

Norm Dixon is a member of the National Committee of the Australian
Democratic Socialist Party and a journalist for Green
Left Weekly.

In his critique of my article in Links Number 13, "Marx,
Engels and Lenin on the National Question", Malik Miah (Links Number 14) charges that "Dixon presents a formalistic and schematic understanding of the theory of
the national question" and "narrowly defines what a nation is and what Lenin
means by self-determination, and rejects the nationalism of many oppressed peoples".

The purpose of my article was to reassert that the Marxist theory of
the national question as it was developed by Marx, Engels and Lenin and
definitively outlined in Stalin's 1913 pamphlet, Marxism and the National
Question is firmly based on a materialist, scientific analysis of
what does and does not constitute a nation.

Another purpose of the article was to alert to the consequences that
losing sight of this scientific socialist understanding of a nation can
lead to at the least, ideological confusion, and, at worst, support for
politically inappropriate, incorrect or even reactionary slogans and demands.

This is the text of a speech that was printed in the Militant,
the newspaper of the us Socialist Workers Party, on October 10, 1969,
shortly before the massive anti-war demonstrations scheduled to occur
in mid-November of that year. Gus Horowitz was the SWP's national anti-war
director during that year and through the first half of 1970. Minor spelling
and punctuation changes have been made in the text reprinted here. The
introduction was by the Militant.

Introduction

On Labour Day weekend [September 1969] in New York, the Socialist
Workers Party held its national convention. One of the central points on the
agenda was a resolution assessing developments within the movement against the
Vietnam War and the role of the SWP within that movement.

Discussion on the resolution was initiated with a report by Gus Horowitz,
a member of the party's national committee and its representative to the
New Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam.

This article is taken from a chapter of volume one of a political memoir, covering
the years 1960-1973. Barry Sheppard was a central leader of the US Young Socialist Alliance and Socialist Workers Party during the years 1960-1988.

***

Malcolm X was born Malcolm Little in Omaha, Nebraska, on May
19, 1925. In February 1946 he was sentenced in Massachusetts to 8-10 years'
imprisonment for burglary. While in prison, he was won to the Nation of Islam,
a Black Nationalist religious sect founded by W.D. Fard and headed at that time
and until his death by Elijah Muhammad. Emerging in the early 1930s, the Nation
of Islam was one of the groups that developed as a result of the decline and
splintering of Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association, which
had galvanised a large section of the Black community after World War I. The
Nation of Islam taught a religious doctrine that Black people were blessed by
God and that whites were devils specially created to oppress Black people. They
called for the creation of an independent Black nation in the United States,
but tended to stress that the achievement of this state would be the work of
God, not human beings.